4000 to 3800 BCE · Africanspan
One word for father-in-law dates patriarchy to 4000 BCE
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Proto-Semitic was spoken around 4000 to 3800 BCE in the region of Syria, Palestine and Israel. In that language the word for father-in-law comes from the much older proto-Afroasiatic word for father's brother. A shift like that records a fact about households. It happens where a man's father-in-law usually is his father's brother, which is the marriage rule anthropologists call preferential parallel-cousin marriage. That rule concentrates marriages inside the paternal line, keeps property and loyalty there, and turns up again and again alongside strongly patriarchal social structure. So one semantic change dates the arrangement. Strong patriarchy among Semitic speakers is at least six thousand years old. It was in place while cities were emerging along and inland from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and it predates the large states of the region by a millennium. When those states arrived they formalised an order that was already running, which is what states generally do.
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